


clovelly, devon

by marinersapptcomplex



Category: 1917 (Movie 2019)
Genre: Depression, Emotionally Repressed, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sad gays, World War I
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-28
Updated: 2020-01-28
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:15:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22442410
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marinersapptcomplex/pseuds/marinersapptcomplex
Summary: War continued, concealed in a dream.
Relationships: Joseph Blake & William Schofield, Tom Blake/William Schofield
Comments: 16
Kudos: 108





	clovelly, devon

**Author's Note:**

> uhh??? what do you mean schofield has a wife and kids??? ALSO this is literally first draft, hot off the press, no editing we die like men

In the hours after: Schofield sat on a mossy hill, looking down at the grass. A soldier with his leg missing was crying in the distance. A medic was singing songs in French, _et les roses mourront avec l'été, et nos routes peuvent être éloignées…_

Blake’s brother sat down beside him and offered him a cigarette.

“No, thank you.” The words fell out like mud. 

“Suit yourself.” The man with Blake’s eyes struck a match, lit a cigarette. 

For a long time, they sat in silence. It was Schofield that broke the stillness first when he asked, “What day is it now?”

Blake’s brother took a drag of his cigarette, then another and another. The words came out with the rest of the smoke, choked up, hiding something, “Saturday, I think.”

“Right, yes.” His mouth twitched, not knowing whether to smile or laugh. “I should’ve known that.”

The both of them stared up at the sky. It was blue with smoke rising up into it like something out of a painting. Schofield, for a very brief moment, forgot that he was alive and almost startled at the sound of his own blood thrumming through his veins. 

Blake’s brother stubbed the end of the cigarette out on his left index finger. Schofield didn’t know why, he didn’t want to ask. It wasn’t the time. 

“Did you write that letter?” 

The air shifted around Schofield. He licked the cracked skin around his lips and tasted iodine. “No, not yet.”

“Mum will appreciate it, I think. She always thought Tom didn’t have a lot of friends back at home. Not good ones, anyway.” 

“He was a good man.” Schofield affirmed. He wanted to say more, wanted to say that there really were no words to express the sort of man that Blake was. But he couldn’t, didn’t know how to. 

“Yes,” Blake’s brother rested his head in his hands. “A good man.”

The medic had stopped singing in French, Schofield realised. The soldier with his leg missing had gone silent. Somewhere, in the distance, birdsong rang out from the trees. War continued, concealed in a dream. 

“You’re lucky to be alive, you know.”

He did not notice that Blake’s brother was crying beside him at first. The gentle shake of his shoulders. His hands curled up around his face. Minutes went on, silently. 

Again, Schofield tried to speak. Tried to say: _I’m not alive. I’m somewhere else, looking for him. Waiting. I’ll bring him back to you, I swear._

Blake’s brother reached for his hand and held it tightly. “I thought that this war, this violence, it would make me good, make me worth something, but it hasn’t, it’s only made me worse.”

“I know.” 

“I thought it would be different.”

“I know.” Schofield said again, and didn’t elaborate. There was something wrong with his chest. Like his heart had fallen off of a shelf and onto the floor. 

On the meadows below: the bodies of men. Some already rotting. Some blanched and burnt from the heat of the Spring sun. One dismantled soldier had collapsed under a bed of daisies to die, another had fallen to the root of an oak tree, his arms crossed around the wound on his abdomen. As if, perhaps, he had only sat down and fallen asleep. 

Blake’s brother smudged the tears out of his eyes, then said, “Nothing to be done, I suppose.”

Schofield tried to coax the words out of his mouth, but something in his body told him _no_. 

“The only way to get through it is to go forward.” The man who was almost Blake ( _but not quite_ ) tried to smile. “Wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes.” Schofield said. 

The man stood up and stared back at the sun until water was bleeding from his eyes. The man wiped his eyes again. The man whispered something under his breath that Schofield did not hear. 

“Well,” He reached down to touch Schofield’s shoulder. Schofield reached back and touched his knuckles. “Must be getting on now.”

The man began to walk away. It was like something out of a story book. He noticed the cut on his hand was pink and leaking blood. Then he realised he had forgotten to ask for the man’s first name. 

\--

Schofield had stayed with the Devonshire Regiment for two weeks and then travelled on to Passchendaele where he lost his arm and three toes. He spent four months in a hospital where the nurses sang about their babies and the injured men told ghost stories from their beds. 

Schofield learned that ghosts were not as scary as fighter planes or gunshots or Ecoust in darkness. Schofield learned that men only told ghost stories to distract themselves from their real fear, which was ultimately, war. 

When he returned home, he wrote the letter, months late. (I _’m sorry for your loss. I’m sorry I couldn’t do more_.) He had also asked for her to send back something of his, but then crossed it out, feeling foolish. Only a month had passed when he received a letter back from Blake’s mother, where she explained that Blake’s brother, Joseph was his name, had died from pneumonia some time ago. She asked if Schofield would like to visit her. 

Inside the envelope: a Saint Christopher necklace that belonged to Blake. 

\--

Schofield remembered:

Midnight. Weeks before the Hindenburg Line. Him and Blake piled into a decrepit farmhouse to sleep. They were drinking their rations of rum under haystacks. 

They told stories of their childhood, swapping them like playing cards. Schofield began to recall Blake’s memories as his own. The fishing port in Clovelly, how little Blake and his brother would stand on the docks for hours, waiting for the fisherman to haul blue lobsters up and out of the water. How their skin would catch the light. The slant of the sun on their silver-shelled backs. 

After the rum was finished: Blake laughed so hard he threw up. Schofield still went on laughing, staying close with his hand on the small of Blake’s back. Something about the moonlight. Something about the quick of his breath. 

At some point, Blake stopped throwing up. His eyes became heavy, unadjusted in the light. He reached forward and held onto Schofield’s collar. 

Schofield fell to the floor, taking Blake with him. Words lost meaning in the dark. 

Blake said, “I want to kiss you.”

Schofield said, “You smell of sick,” but kissed him anyway. 

Blake touched his hand, then the space between his forearm and shoulder, then pulled his undershirt up over his head and threw it into the hay. His fingers climbed the stretch of Schofield’s leg and settled there for a long moment. 

Schofield remembered feeling it all. His heart jumping in his ribs. The soft but pounding ache in his chest. When it was all over, he turned over on his side so Blake could kiss his neck, feel the rhythm of his heart beating through his skin. 

Blake was out of breath when he said quietly, “You’d like Clovelly.”

Schofield noticed that the sweat on Blake’s back looked blue in the moonlight. He thought of the lobsters coming up out of the water in the village of Clovelly. How their shells must have shone like silver. 

“You should come home with me,” Blake adjusted his body in the hay, then his hand reached through the darkness and touched Schofield’s face. “When it’s all over.”

Schofield laughed. He didn’t know if it would ever be over. Blake didn’t know either. 

“I’d like that.” 

They stayed like that for a long time. Tangled up and aching. Schofield rehearsed the words that he wanted to say but would never say, which were of course, _I love you_. 

\--

He took the night train to Cornwall from London. There was a tram in Devon, then a boat ride onwards. On the boat over to Clovelly, there was a rock with pink moss spread across its surface. The man that was driving the boat told him that when the tide was high, the water took the moss away in pieces. 

The air affected him here in strange ways. He found himself crying over the smallest things. The image of pink moss floating away in salt-water. 

Kitty, Blake’s mother, met him at the docks. When he stepped onto land, she took him into her arms like he was her long-lost son, returned from war, safe at last. For a moment, Schofield allowed himself to kneel into the dream of being loved again. 

She served him cake and tea. They sat in the little patch of grass that was her garden and discussed the semantics of flowers and their life cycles.

“The roses, they’re very pretty, but after I cut them, they die so quickly.” Kitty sectioned her cake into smaller pieces with her fingers. Schofield wondered what she was rationing it for and if she was saving it for someone else. “Poppies, that’s what everybody’s talking about now, saying they’re a symbol for peace and rest. Can you believe it?”

Schofield waited a moment before he spoke, “Nothing grew where we were. It was just mud. Mud on mud on mud.”

Kitty continued to separate her cake up into pieces. “They’re trying to make me believe my boys went peacefully, but I don’t, I don't believe it at all.” The crumbs broke up between her fingers like soil. Schofield noticed there were tears in her eyes. “And, why in God’s name would you pick something like a poppy. It’s horrid, and ugly, much too red —”

Water dribbled out of Kitty’s closed eyes. Schofield reached for the handkerchief inside his breast pocket and pressed it into her hands. Kitty cried harder. Somehow he understood. 

Later: Schofield took a bath. Kitty made him beef stew and dumplings for dinner. A slice of bread and jam for pudding. He ate it gratefully, despite how unhungry he was. 

At the dinner table, Kitty asked, “Is Schofield your Christian name, love?” 

“No,” he could hear the neighbours next door faintly. Someone playing the scales on a violin. “My name’s —”

Forgetting, just for a second. Then, slowly, unused to it, saying, “Will. My name is Will.”

\---

\--

He slept in Blake’s bedroom with the windows open so the crickets could drown out the sound of his own breath. He memorised the ribbons and commendations from school, toy cars and trains on the mantelpiece, the depressions in the bed where Blake might once have slept. 

He woke later. It took him a moment to realise that Blake was standing by the door. 

Schofield was the first to speak this time, “You’re not really here, are you?”

Blake didn’t move. His face was somber in the blue light. “No.” 

Schofield sat up in bed and smiled without crying, even though he desperately wanted to. He noticed there was pink moss scattered in small pieces throughout Blake’s hair, as if he too had been washed away by the ocean along with the moss. 

“You were right, you know. I like it here.” He stared at Blake. The spotlessness of his uniform. 

“You should stay.” Blake walked towards the end of the bed. “It might do you some good.”

Somewhere: the scales on the violin again. High-pitched and echoing. Schofield observed that the floor was moving into the ceiling and that the ceiling was made of light. 

“It should have been me.” He said, stupidly and obviously, though he felt it was the only thing worth saying. “I wish it had been me.”

“Stop,” he held out his hand and offered Schofield what he had offered him all those times before: tentativeness. “You can’t do _that_ , be living in two places at once, the present and the past. It wasn’t your fault. You know that, Will. You must.”

“But it hurts.”

“I know, I’m sorry.” Blake approached him and sat down on the bed, then took his shoes off and lay beside him. “Sorry for clocking out early.”

Schofield smiled, his tears baptising the pillow. “You said you’d be with me, all the way to the end. Don’t you remember?”

“I do,” he whispered back, then put his hand to Schofields cheek and held it there. “But I can’t be here with you now.”

Rain sounded off in the distance. “Where are you? Where can I find you?”

Blake didn’t answer. Schofield knew he would not answer for a second time if he asked again. So, instead, he said, “What was it like? Dying.”

He smoothed his hand over Schofield’s face like he was smoothing out the ridges on a rock. Something that looked like a tear, but wasn’t a tear, leaked out of his eye. Time seemed to be moving in snapshots. 

After a moment, he said, “It certainly had nothing to do with God. At least, not for me.”

The two of them started laughing. It was difficult to know what they were really laughing about. 

Blake stopped quite suddenly and spoke again, “Death is not what they tell you it is, Will. I’ll say that. It wasn’t a change in the air, or a weight being lifted off, it wasn’t like flying, or falling. There’s no answer, God whispers not a word — it felt more like breaking apart, the replacement of nature with something else. I wish I could explain — Nothing is but it. It's just there, like a wall.”

Schofield wanted to cry some more and say something about the way that Blake still smelled of hay and mud and rum. But he didn’t. Instead, he wrapped an arm around Blake and held him, never wanting to let go. 

Blake squeezed his arm, then reached forward and kissed the tip of his nose. 

Schofield said, “Would you stay with me? Just until I fall asleep.”

“Yes,” he smiled and grazed a finger across the stretch of his neck. “I’d like that.”

Schofield closed his eyes. The rain continued. Somewhere, the violin was repeating itself, the scales slowly starting up again. 

**Author's Note:**

> I think I probably (definitely) messed up a lot of the dates and times of various things during WW1, so I am very sorry for that. Anywho, I hope you enjoyed me writing emotionally repressed George MacKay pining after that dude from Game of Thrones


End file.
